Search for America's Heart, by Peter Edelman, NYT review

eter Edelman
was an idealistic young Minnesotan just a few years out of Harvard Law
School when he went to work for Robert F. Kennedy's 1964 Senate
campaign. In ''Searching for America's Heart,'' he seems to have been
just as idealistic and young -- the unkind would say naive -- when he
went to work for President Clinton 29 years later. In fact, he seemed
to be looking for another Bobby Kennedy. He wants to make it very
clear that Bill Clinton was not it.

Edelman's book is an idiosyncratic blend of policy, score-settling,
attempts at political inspiration and memoir. But it is infused,
throughout, with two emotions -- mourning for Bobby Kennedy and ''the
larger spirit of the 60's,'' and anger at Clinton and what might be
called the spirit of the 70's, 80's and 90's. Edelman is utterly
contemptuous of the backlash against conventional liberal thinking on
poverty -- and of the elected officials who acknowledge, respond to or
encourage that backlash.

''Why do some people have so little though we are vastly wealthier
as a nation than even a generation ago?'' he asks. The explanation in
vogue, he writes, ''says the problem is government programs and
especially 'welfare.' It says welfare has produced dependency,
unwillingness to work, increased nonmarital births, drug abuse and
crime. It especially emphasizes 'illegitimacy,' and says poverty is
not an issue of money at all but one of 'culture,' which has to be
changed by sanctions to change behavior.''

In reality, he says, the persistence of poverty can be traced to
the fact that ''the labor market has been in trouble since about 1973
because of deindustrialization, globalization and technological
change.'' Even in a boom, he writes, ''there are large numbers of
lousy jobs'' that simply don't pay a living wage for families trying
to make their way out of poverty, particularly those carrying added
burdens of racial discrimination and lack of education.

Edelman, in short, is an unreconstructed liberal, out of his time.
His view of Kennedy is romantic, heroic, undiminished by grays -- the
man who loved children,'' as he puts it. For four years, as a campaign
and Senate staff member, Edelman was at his side, on a ''journey of
discovery'' into poverty and a nation in tumult. He witnessed the
''riveting scene'' when Kennedy first met Cesar Chavez, the
farmworkers organizer, in a parking lot in California. He traveled
with Kennedy to the Mississippi Delta, investigating the hunger and
malnutrition that existed in much of the rural South at the time. On
that trip he met his future wife, Marian Wright, who was then with the
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in Mississippi, and who would
eventually head the Children's Defense Fund.

''I was extremely impressed,'' he writes, in a passage that
captures the blend of the personal and the political in this memoir.
''She was really smart and really good-looking.''

Edelman looks back proudly on the welfare proposals of the 1960's,
noting that Kennedy's last position paper, released a few days before
the 1968 California Democratic primary and Kennedy's death, called for
the creation of 2.4 million jobs, half of them in the public sector
''to build and staff needed community facilities and do other needed
tasks.'' It also called for tax incentives and loans to spur
development in poor areas, transportation assistance to help people
get to distant jobs and an array of other subsidies and grants to help
poor people with housing and education. But things soon began to
change -- for the worse, in Edelman's view.

After Kennedy, Edelman writes bitterly, ''a racially tinged
offensive against the poor acquired momentum as the decades passed.
The refrain is familiar by now: It's their fault. It's their behavior.
Those people. They have to change. They have to take responsibility
for themselves.''

BOOK EXCERPT

"President Clinton's misuse of Robert Kennedy's words
highlighted a stark difference between the two young leaders.
One pressed for social justice whenever he could. The other,
originally projecting a commitment to renewing national
idealism, ended up governing mainly according to the lowest
common denominator. A proper invocation of RFK would have
brought us full circle to a new commitment. Instead we completed
a U-turn."

Still,
Edelman was hopeful that Bill Clinton would bring a ''new idealism''
to the fight against poverty. In 1993, Edelman signed on as a top
official in the Department of Health and Human Services. He eventually
resigned because Clinton signed the sweeping welfare legislation of
1996, imposing time limits on aid, pushing people into the work force
and revoking a longstanding federal guarantee of assistance. His
assessment of the Democratic president is harsh, belittling and again
unmodified by grays.

''His goal was re-election at all costs,'' Edelman writes of
Clinton. ''Whatever his rationalizations, he was at bottom interested
only in himself. His political approach was not to calculate the risks
but to take no risks at all.'' And again: ''He has tended generally to
make things worse for the politically powerless.'' And again: ''His
penchant for elevating shadow over substance has hurt poor children.''

The personal tone is not surprising: the Edelmans and the Clintons
had known each other for years, but the relationship steadily frayed
after Clinton took power. Edelman did not get the judicial appointment
that many had expected; the White House apparently chose not to battle
the conservative opposition that it surely would have generated.

But Edelman focuses on what he sees as a larger, political betrayal
-- although it is hard to believe that he really felt, in 1992, that
Clinton had only ''flirted with the revisionists of the Democratic
Leadership Council'' as ''a tactic to prove that he was a new kind of
Democrat.'' Only a liberal in deep denial could miss the fact that
Clinton was serious about reinventing the Democratic Party and moving
it to the center. After five Democratic defeats in the previous six
presidential elections, how could Clinton not be serious about
changing his party?

By the end of ''Searching for America's Heart,'' the differences
between the two seem both simple and profound: Bill Clinton is a
political man. Peter Edelman is not. Bill Clinton made more
compromises than he needed to. Peter Edelman clings to a high-minded
worldview that does not recognize the need to compromise in a system
that, after all, requires one to win elections in order to govern. The
Kennedys rarely made that mistake.

Robin Toner is a senior correspondent in the Washington bureau of
The Times.